Naive question: Is there information about how viruses and anti-viruses work? I have various linux servers (which seem not to be the point of this discussion) and a linux laptop machine I use almost exclusively for development. I worry about supply chain attacks (I do machine learning development in python and there have been various recent examples of package repositories having malicious content inserted.) Would any antivirus help with that?
What else do I need to be worried about using linux?
ML is pretty promiscuous (as are some other ecosystems), so supply-chain is a realistic threat to a developer. restricting the user that runs such code is helpful. but suppose it gets owned:
- can it call home?
- can it escalate to root?
the latter might be via a local kernel compromise, but that's challenging if calling home is hard. otoh, sudo is often installed...
What else do I need to be worried about using linux?